Another documentary, another boring subject! We’re only halfway through Trump’s second year and already we want a rehash of his first? That sounds like the quintessence of staleness—material well known, and too close to have been forgotten. On top of that nearness, the far-ness of dealing not with the primary subject himself, but a second hand view through the distancing filter of the media.
How did anyone know there’d be such a good story here? I suppose the campaign of 2016 gave warning of that. One characteristic of the Trump era is that things don’t hold still, but move at nerve-wracking speed. We have never seen anything like this before, and might thus imagine that Trump is setting the pace himself, like a reality show host manufacturing rivalries, creating bogies, throwing out childish nicknames.
But these four programmes show over and over again that ‘events’ do not sit there for the taking, clearly marked and distinct. Especially when the government is bent on keeping you from finding out, the task of recognising what will constitute a real event with important consequences often presents an intellectual challenge of a high order. The nature and significance of the famous meeting between Donald Trump Jr and Russian emissaries had to be pieced together out of scattered hints threatening to vanish under a flurry of lies.
Often stories don’t have single authors and contributions come from far afield. The cast of characters is vast and verges on confusing. These films disobey one of the basic rules for creating human interest: pick out one or two individuals and stick with them, making a person stand for an amorphous group. The filmmakers opt instead for breadth, jumping from reporter to reporter to convey the headlong plunge of this terrible period in the history of the country.
Participants in the films never allow themselves a melodramatic phrase like ‘this terrible period in the history of the country.’ They avoid heat and vehemence to a superhuman degree. Their devotion to finding out the truth is expressed in tellingly individual ways. In a quixotic quest for neutrality one reporter hasn’t voted in the last two presidential elections. A striking expression of their search for accuracy is the evolution of headlines for crucial articles, shown on screen as successive versions blotting each other out.
These are films about Trump in which he hardly appears. That seems a stroke of genius. We see him very briefly around the white supremacist episode in Charlottesville, once when he is saying there is fault ‘on both sides, on both sides,’ repeating the key claim as a fragment, drumming it in. The other clip is equally chilling, when he is blaming ‘the fake media’ for what happened at Charlottesville and sicks the crowd on reporters sitting at their desks behind flimsy barriers at the back of the hall. The scene turns nasty and the reporters pack up their gear and file out silently.
Americans will still be obsessively interested in these topics for a long time to come, however and whenever Trump’s direct influence on events ends. However it all finishes, the quiet persistence of the team of reporters and editors we meet in these films stands right now as a heroic example, inspiring hope for better days.
Reporting Trump’s First Year: The Fourth Estate, 4 hour-long episodes by Liz Garbus on BBC Storyville
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